In a new web video released Thursday potential 2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitch Daniels called his suggestion that potential Republican candidates declare a truce on social issues in the next election “a tactical suggestion.”

In an interview with “Uncommon Knowledge,” a webcast in conjunction with the Hoover Institute at Stanford University, the Indiana governor said avoiding moral issues during the primaries would prevent the party from alienating voters: “all I was really saying was I don’t want to lose one person.”

Daniels has repeatedly voiced opposition to using social issues for political gain in the next election. Most recently he told radio host Laura Ingraham he wanted to “mute” topics like abortion and gay marriage for awhile while the country confronts the economic crisis.

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In Thursday’s video Daniels said the country needs to make the kind of changes that will “restore America’s greatness.”

“All I was saying was we’re going to need to unify all kinds of people and we’re going to need, freedom’s going to need very friend it can get.”

Video:

In some ways, Daniels seems to be echoing the “big tent” ideas of people like Lee Atwater, who emphasized, correctly I think, that in order to win nationally the GOP needs to appeal to a wide array of voters. Daniels takes it one step further, though, by arguing that our fiscal issue are so urgent that the GOP needs to build a coalition of fiscal conservatives, which will, of necessity, include people who are not social conservatives and who do not believe that it is business of government to be imposing religious morality on the populace.

It makes perfect sense, really. It’s the kind of thing that might actually get me to vote Republican again. It is, in the end, the only way, the GOP is going to preserve the majorities in won in 2010. Which is exactly why the GOP won’t listen.

Message to Daniels: Grow a spine. We got into this mess with compromise. The Tea Party grew to such prominence because of the damage that compromise brought our country, and the understanding of an ever growing number of Americans that compromise with the left5 means we fail as a country.

Now why would I deprive you of yet another chance to mischaracterize the actual position of actual conservatives? You speak glibly about the demonization of the left and its positions. Yet you engage in the same of the right. Double standard.

Well, the Tea Party came together because a bunch of right-wing extremists put aside everything except their rage, so why can’t the GOP try a reversal? Let’s face it; while there are lots of actual sane people with conservative opinions, the most unswervingly loyal voter base for the GOP consists of:
– Evangelicals, who want their personal brand of Christianity declared the Law of the Land,
– Homophobes, and
– Racists

I don’t mean this as an ad hominem attack, I mean it as a simple observation. Lots of other conservative folk – people who consider themselves lifelong Republicans – are perfectly rational people, but they’re not the people Daniels is talking to. The people Daniels is trying to talk into a ‘truce’ are nuts. They’re not going to cooperate, and they’re not going to compromise, and they’re not going to let anybody who doesn’t blow their particular dog-whistle out of a primary.

These two EXTREMELY hot button issues, when infected into the GOP will ALWAYS have them lose the independent vote. The Tea Party’s evolution was NOT about these issues. It was about being TAXED unfairly, a bloated Federal Government and the corruption therein and an increasing socialist-creep that looked to circumvent the Constitution.

I wonder if in the future we’ll see the tea party as a manifestation of the money powers behind the GOP basically taking back control after the socons brief foray into the driver’s seat with Bush/Delay/Santorum. The tea party, with it’s appeal to libertarian issues of laissez-faire economics, dovetails nicely with the corporatist agenda (no regulation, no taxes on corporations, unlimited political contributions by corporations and none by unions, etc.). It’s been obvious for some time that the tea party was coopted from a small grassroots group (in the very beginning) to a huge political extension/branding exercise by the GOP and backed by the same big money donors as the party as a whole.

In that respect Mitch’s statement is essentially a polite note to socons that their seats are reserved at the back of the GOP bus and the people who matter would really be obliged if they’d just go sit down and shut up.

The Tea Party got its big push because of the failures of the Bush Administration, the miserable campaign of McCain, and by the massive spending of the Obama Administration. The Tea Party also has been helped by the open border and unlimited proposals of both the Bush Administration and the Obama Administration.

Of course, Mitch Daniels was an enabler for the failures of the Bush Administration and is a supporter of open borders, unlimited immigration, and racial set asides.

Why would any fiscal conservative spend two second listening to a man who is a massive failure on fiscal conservative issues.

If the Republicans want to take away power from the Tea Party types, then the Republicans have to stop spending so much, stop borrowing so much, and stop promoting cheap labor, open borders, and unlimited immigraiton.

1) There are lots of voters who turn out for GOP candidates because of the GOP’s stands on social issues. Many of these voters would stay at home if the GOP didn’t differentiate themselves from the Democrats on these issues.

2) Any serious attempt to deal with our fiscal issues is going to be very unpopular with large numbers of voters and interest groups, because it will involve some combination of cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Defense spending, along with likely tax increases.

3) From the point of view of anyone wanting to win elections, the idea that they anger the voters in 1 so that they can concentrate on really really angering the voters in 2 doesn’t hold much appeal.

4) It’s not even clear that dropping social issues will even help much with building a coalition to deal with the budget. The main reason it’s hard to build a coalition to deal with the budget is that various important interest groups and blocs of voters have different and strongly-held opinions on spending and taxes.

“The last thing social conservatives want is a big spending government subsidizing bad behavior.”

For once, SD, I think you hit the nail on the head. The first thing they want is a big spending government pretending to be a small spending government and subsidizing their behavior, whatever that might be. “Keep your government hands out of my Medicare” is the rallying cry of the Tea Party, as dismal a group of losers as has ever been convened.

Bush left office with very low approval ratings for among other reasons, he grew the government, ran up the debt, and spent like a Democrat. What Bush, Rove, and the conventional Repubicans forgot is that is people are going to vote for big spending politicains, then people will vote for Democrats.

Of course, I remember when moveon.org was concerned about the debt and I remember when the left was worried about the scope and reach of the government. But now that the Democrats control spending and control policy, the debt, the deficit, or the size of government. Now the government’s job is to give free stuff to 95% of Americans and tax the other five percent of the population.

“Bush left office with very low approval ratings for among other reasons, he grew the government, ran up the debt, and spent like a Democrat.”

We should complete the list. He also grew the debt, gave us the largest unfunded spending bill in history to buy the votes of the elderly, got us into two wars that he mostly mismanaged, helped deregulate the banks and then ignored the problems that lead to the worst economy since the Great Depression.

On topic, I think that an even bigger issue than social problems will be the GOP deciding what it means by fiscal conservatism. For too long it has meant only cutting taxes. If that is what they continue to offer, they will never win back people who are truly concerned about balanced budgets. If, OTOH, they begin to work towards decreasing the debt with some real spending cuts, not this BS discretionary spending stuff, then they may again be credible.

Let’s break this down. The statement that are compromised GOP is a united GOP is on its face an absurd statement, given the number of small ‘R'” republicans who have basically given up on the GOP and who gave rise to the Tea Party. One another example? John McCain. Here’s a man who tried to compromise with the left wing of the party. He lost that election, and the GOP lost a number of seats, because rank and file republicans rejected utterly the kind of compromise he exuded.

The supposedly centrists, the Bushes and the McCains and the Daniels, and frankly, the current GOP leadership in the house and senate, are what’s dividing the party now. If the GOP wants to win elections, and have the support of its rank and file once again, they we’ll need to be constitutional conservatives. Frankly, I don’t think they have it in them.

That may be true, but the problem is that not all fiscal conservatives are social conservatives. Some of them are gay. Some of them might even be Jewish or Muslim or Buddhist. Some might even be atheists or pro-choice.

Mitch Daniels is smart enough to know that those voters are essential if winning a stable majority is the goal.

Funny how Anjin is allowed to tell lie after lie here and no one calls him on it. In my opinion, you are eithe conservative or you are not. Social, fiscal, it is all the same. You are or you are not. Either abortion is murder if you believe life begins at conception. If that is so, and science say it is. Then anyone who thinks a woman has the right to end the life she took part in starting is not conservative. We are tired of RINOs. If Daniels wants to colaborate with the enemy so be it. He will never get elected President. Doug, your little voice on this subject has little to do with reality.

So what you’re basically saying is that fiscal issues are SUPER IMPORTANT but you’d still rather vote for a Democrat who’s bad on fiscal issues than a Republican who’s good on fiscal issues and opposes gay marriage?

Virtually all social conservatives are fiscal conservatives. The last thing social conservatives want is a big spending government subsidizing bad behavior.

Of course. Nobody wants the government to subsidize behavior that they consider to be “bad”. Also, nobody is in favor of “government waste”, for their definition of “waste”. Being a fiscal conservative doesn’t just mean that the government shouldn’t spend money wastefully. It means wanting a balanced budget (or at least something much much closer to balanced than we have now).

But, there’s a reason why neither party has wanted to step forward and fix our budget problems. Most government spending is on Defense, Medicare/Medicaid & Social Security (and the entitlement spending is going to increase as the population ages). You can’t fix the budget without dealing with those programs, but big cuts in those programs are not popular:

Opposition to cuts in entitlements and defense doesn’t cleanly break down along social conservative/social liberal lines. In the case of defense, I suspect you’ll find social liberals more in favor of spending cuts than social conservatives. For programs like Medicare and Social Security, some demographics that are largely socially conservative, such as the elderly, strongly oppose cuts.

The problem that the Repubicans face is that virutally all homosexuals, Jews, Hispanics, Blacks, and government workers are like michael reynolds above. Those groups are quiet happy to have a massive government, high taxes, 100,000 of pages of regulations, open borders, unlimited immigration, high unemployment just as long as they get their own little piece of the government spending. That is why blacks never vote out incompetent politicians, why urban schools are horrible, and why the U.S. is on the downward slope to becoming a third world country.

People like Michael would rather live in a third world hell hole before he would let anyone call him a racist.

> but the defeat of McCain seems to suggest the facts are somewhat different than your portrayal.

This is coming from the rocket scientist who spent all of 2008 telling us that Obama could not win. And about the civil war that was certain to happen at the Democratic convention. Then there was your obsessive posting about the McCain “surge” in the two days leading up to the election, crowing all the time about the insider information you had that most folks just did not have access to.

I can see why you like the tea party. They have taken the cult of stupidity and ignorance to the point where a guy like you can pass himself off as an intellectual.

You are a perfect example of a True Conservative and Republican. I can’t understand why Doug hasn’t invited you over to meet the family. After all, he feels he fits in so much better with people like you than with guys like me or Anjin or ponce or wr.

Yea super, where was all this rage about spending and big government when Bush was vastly increasing the size and power of the federal government? Oh yea, there was none. In fact most of you cats had a serious man crush on ol’ W.

But then Bush is a conservative, and he is white. Obama is, as they say, a horse of a different color…

You keep saying that, but the defeat of McCain seems to suggest the facts are somewhat different than your portrayal.

Umm, not really, unless you can somehow prove that someone as conservative as Palin at the top of the GOP ticket would have beaten the president back in ’08…good luck with that…

…a Republican who’s good on fiscal issues…

On the federal level? In a leadership position? Who the hell would that be?

The problem that the Repubicans face is that virutally all homosexuals, Jews, Hispanics, Blacks, and government workers are like michael reynolds above.

Actually, the problem that the Republicans face is that their base is growing with people like superdestroyer while alienating just about every other ethnic and social group with their stance on and emphasis of particular social issues…please keep talking about how this country is being turned into a third world hellhole because of certain people…that’s a really good path to electoral success…

If you are not in favor of slow, careful tax hikes (so as to prevent a tax shock that damages the recovery) then you don’t get to criticize Obama on the deficit and be treated as a reasonable human being, because you are not.

There were conseratives who complained about the expansion of mediciare, the pointless spending, the expansion of government. Of course, what happen to all of the liberals who were worried about spending during the Bush Administration. Why does trillion dollar deficit not matter when a Democrat is running them up.

As the U.S. goes forward is a big spending nanny state while maintaining open borders and unlimited immigration, the U.S. will be caught is an economic spiral that will lead to a lowering of the standard of living for most Americans.

The problem for the left is that there is no place in the U.S. for middle class whites who work in the private sector other than being tax slaves to fund the nanny state. As most of the U.S will resemble Detroit, Baltimore, El Paso, or Los Angeles, there is no room left for middle class whites and those middle class whites know it.

“There were conseratives who complained about the expansion of mediciare, the pointless spending, the expansion of government. Of course, what happen to all of the liberals who were worried about spending during the Bush Administration.”

There were few conservatives who complained about the spending. There were many liberals who complained about the unfunded spending, both of Medicare and the wars. Stiglitz wrote a whole book on the unfunded wars.

“The problem for the left is that there is no place in the U.S. for middle class whites ”

Sigh. The whole issue of “big government”, our future debt, is health care costs. That is 90% of it. There is no place for anyone other than the wealthy if we dont address it. The GOP has no plan, has never spent any political capital on the issue.

“The problem that the Repubicans face is that virutally all homosexuals, Jews, Hispanics, Blacks, and government workers are like michael reynolds above. Those groups are quiet happy to have a massive government, high taxes, 100,000 of pages of regulations, open borders…”

Assuming you’re not just indulging in hyperbole for entertainment’s sake, I think this statement demonstrates a profound ignorance of gays, Jews, Hispanics, blacks, and government workers.

These are the facts:

There are conservative gays, conservative Jews, conservative Latinos, conservative blacks, and most definitely conservative government workers. If the Republican establishment (and the voters who support them) insist on labeling these groups “the enemy,” these groups will vote Democrat.

The result will be this: A Republican party that can’t cobble together a meaningful majority and a more conservative Democratic party.

The problem that the Repubicans face is that virutally all homosexuals, Jews, Hispanics, Blacks, and government workers are like michael reynolds above. Those groups are quiet happy to have a massive government, high taxes, 100,000 of pages of regulations, open borders, unlimited immigration, high unemployment just as long as they get their own little piece of the government spending. That is why blacks never vote out incompetent politicians, why urban schools are horrible, and why the U.S. is on the downward slope to becoming a third world country.

We keep going center then left and center then left again, and completely ignoring the only solution to the problem that will ever work; real conservatives. The left, of course, rejoice is in this, hence your comments. But if you look around you, you might notice the country itself isn’t doing all that well as a result of this lack.

There are conservative gays, conservative Jews, conservative Latinos, conservative blacks, and most definitely conservative government workers. If the Republican establishment (and the voters who support them) insist on labeling these groups “the enemy,” these groups will vote Democrat.

Or, Tea Party. Else they’ll remove themselves from the system altogether and avoid voting as many did in response to McCain.

There are conservative gays, conservative Jews, conservative Latinos, conservative blacks, and most definitely conservative government workers. I

Is how few of gays, Jews, Latinos, Blacks, or government workers are conservative. Blacks vote 95% for Democrats and just voted Major Fenty out of a job in DC because Mayor Fenty was too nice to whites. Hispanics and Jews vote for Democrats at a higher than 80% rate and Jews are some of the most liberal members of Congress. Homosexuals are almost universally liberal and support a big government in order to control religious and conservative Americans.

The idea any conservative party can appeal to blacks, Hispanics, or Jews is extremely laughable. What Conservatives need to do is adopt policies to limit the political power of those ethnic groups and the best way is to deny them money from the government such as set aside, quotas, or union contracts. As long as the government gives money to Hispanics, blacks, public sector unions for being in those groups, they will remain liberals.

“What Conservatives need to do is adopt policies to limit the political power of those ethnic groups ”

Newsflash, dude. That’s racist, undemocratic, and if you think it’s “conservative,” you need to get a better understanding of what the word means. Now excuse me while I go have a more enlightened conversation….with my kitchen table.

Yes, well, Bush did manage to “win” in 2000 and secured reelection in 2004…

But if you look around you, you might notice the country itself isn’t doing all that well as a result of this lack.

Oh, woe is us! Make sure there are plenty of fainting couches and smelling salts! If only, if only we could have a modern day Barry Goldwater (or Robert Welch, Jr., perhaps) as president, than all of our country’s problems would be solved and we’d live happily ever after…

Meanwhile, considering the way superdestroyer and his ilk feel about the groups of people he describes, is it any wonder most of those people vote for Democrats rather than Republicans? I mean, really, considering the hostility shown towards these people, why would they possibly vote for the GOP in large numbers? If the GOP wants to make sure to fade into irrelevance, all the party needs to do is latch itself onto the noxious ideas of people like superdestroyer…

All the conservatives should be doing is demanding that the government and all government policies treat blacks and Hispanics the same as everyone else. No more minority set asides; no more separate-and-unequal hiring, admission, or performance standards; no more all black universities or all black contractors.

The Democratic Party’s support for separate and unequal is why blacks and Hispanics support the Democrats. As long as the Democrats say that they will tax the crap out of whites (using the code word: rich) and give it to minorities ( no matter how rich they are) then all of those minorities will stay with the Democratic Party.

I support the idea that the government has no business asking a citizen what their race or ethnicity is because the only thing that data can be used for is to discriminate. The Democrats want a world where the elite whites are above it all while the middle class is held to a higher standard than middle class blacks (See the Gratz Supreme Court decision for a classic example).

Before Jennifer Gratz won her reverse discrimination case against the University of Michigan, my employer before I retired, the admissions office gave extra points to a number of groups: 20 points to minorities, the kind of favoritism superdestroyer disdains, 16 points to students from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, an overwhelmingly white region, four points to the children of Michigan alumni, also overwhelmingly white, and ten points to the mainly white children who attended the top high schools in the state (as defined by the admissions office). Our own children got 14 extra points, four because my wife graduated from Michigan and ten because our kids graduated from high schools in Ann Arbor. Sorry to attack your sense of victimization, superdestroyer, but Michigan’s admission policy was less about helping minorities than with gaining brownie points with members of the state legislature.

thank you for confirming what I have always believed about race based programs. The left will scream racism every chance it gets but always designs government policy so that the children of the elite white progressives are not harmed by the program.

You may want to remember that the argument made by the State of Michigan is that diversity was so important that is was Okay to have separate and unequal admission standards. Of course, progressives always live a very non-diverse life because they know what the truth is but know that they are not allowed to say it aloud.

You also did not mention that the University of Michigan did not tell the citizens of Michigan that there were separate and unequal admission standards for blacks and Hispanics (independent of residence location or parental status) but that it came out during legal preceedings.

superdestroyer, I have very mixed feelings about Michigan’s admission process. On the one hand, I feel it was unfair to the Jennifer Gratz’s of this world, and as I indicated in my message, I think the admissions office of the university had some cynical motives when it came up with its point system for admission. But it’s also possible that the admissions officers were sincerely concerned about social stratification. The median family income for students at Michigan’s Ann Arbor campus is now well above $100,000 per year. There is something deeply unhealthy about having so many students at a public university coming from such affluent circumstances, particularly when Michigan’s economy is in a nose dive. I don’t like the class system we’ve developed in the US. Over half the income gains in the last 20 years have gone to the richest 1% of the population. I don’t think this is right, and apparently you do. So I’m really not in agreement with your position.

Democrats own the debt growth of the last two years, and will own the growth of the next two (or six) years. There is no sense in trying to blame today’s new spending problems on any past administration, which people here do at the drop of a P. The problems we face are here and now, and so are the failures to act, or to act as if our debt doesn’t exist, so spend, spend spend.

And then, to try to increase the revenue stream to cover the new spending programs.
That is the very definition of tax and spend, or spend and tax, either of which blows up the national debt, simply because the new revenues do not go to reducing the debt at all. They go to new social spending, so we are ever increasing the national debt, service on the debt, and then taxes.

We do need more revenue, but not to facilitate more social programs. We need to pay our way to being debt-free in a reasonable time. We also need to be far more honest about the real and monstrous size of the national debt, which has been swept under the rug. Both the GDP and the debt are “officially” in the $14 trillion range now. What is left over to pay down the debt in a reasonable time?